1
COMMODITIES DEPT.
HONEST HONUS
Is no investment safe? In the course of
a single day earlier this month, the
price of gold, the cautious investor's pe-
rennial refuge, dropped by more than a
hundred dollars an ounce, the biggest
dip in thirty years. Goldman Sachs ad-
vised clients to short, and Société Gé-
nérale, the French bank, released a
paper: "The End of the Gold Era."
Glenn Beck was still buying, but every-
one else had pinned their hopes on bit-
coins, a digital currency that didn't even
exist when the financial world last fell
apart, in 2008. But bitcoins crashed,
too, losing three-quarters of their value
in a week. All this before a bogus tweet
about an attack on the White House
cost the Dow a hundred points last
Tuesday. Back to the mattresses.
Amid the chaos, one investment
continues to offer a consistent return. In
1909, the American Tobacco Company
started shipping a series of five hundred
and twenty-four cards inside packs of
cigarettes. The T206 lithographs---
small, with crisp white borders and col-
orful backgrounds---were an instant hit,
and one of the cards, featuring Honus
Wagner, the shortstop for the Pitts-
burgh Pirates, has become, for reasons
that remain mysterious, the most valu-
able baseball card in existence. The card
is rare, but others are rarer, and Wag-
ner's name now falls behind Ruth, Man-
tle, and others in baseball's all-time bat-
ting order. Yet Wagner is the only
player whose card has sold for seven
figures at public auction.
"There aren't many things you can
stick in your back pocket that could con-
ceivably sell for three million dollars,"
Ken Goldin, a sports-memorabilia auc-
tioneer, said recently, from his office,
in New Jersey. The eight hundred and
fifty items Goldin had in his spring auc-
tion included a pair of underpants (Joe
Montana's), a debit card (Michael Jor-
dan's), and a Wagner T206. Only the
Wagner arrived at Goldin's office, at the
insistence of his insurer, in a Brinks
truck. The card last publicly sold for
"Waiting to Be Heard" is at its most
suggestive---at least, to a reader not in-
vested in Knox's multiple trials. In mak-
ing the argument that she was simply an
innocent abroad, affronting her destiny,
Knox details a concerted effort to shed
her innocence by pursuing sex uncou-
pled from commitment. "Casual sex
was, for my generation, simply what you
did," she writes. On a train from Milan
to Florence, she meets a partner for her
début one-night stand. She contracts
oral herpes, but that doesn't discourage
her from the next opportunity, with a
new acquaintance in Perugia. Unlike Is-
abel Archer, the guileless American in
search of knowledge but debauched by
European wiles and cynicism, Knox
went to Europe with the guileless proj-
ect of seeking to be debauched. She
argues that what was later held up as
evidence of depravity was only another
aspect of artlessness.
She could not anticipate that "my
private, uncertain experiment would
become my undoing"---as it did in
court, when those brief encounters
were placed on an erotic continuum
with a purported scenario in which she
and Raffaele Sollecito, her boyfriend of
a week's standing, along with a man
named Rudy Guede, killed Kercher
in a marijuana-fuelled sex game gone
awry. (Guede was separately convicted
of the crime.) Having been subjected to
slut shaming in the press, Knox repu-
diates the premise. "I hadn't sought out
men because I was obsessed with sex,"
she says. "I was experimenting with my
sexuality."
In this respect, if in no other, her ex-
perience is not so different from that of
many young American women now,
caught in a post-post-feminist narra-
tive in which it is proposed that sexual
emancipation may be achieved through
emotional disengagement. Whatever
light "Waiting to Be Heard" does or
does not shed on the awful death of
Meredith Kercher, it offers a dispirit-
ing account of prevailing mores. It is
not new for students to "give casual sex
a chance." (Today's twenty-year-olds
may be surprised to learn that even
their parents might have tried it.) It
is new for girls to strive to adopt the
sexual behavior of the most opportu-
nistic guy on campus. "I wanted sex
to be about empowerment and plea-
sure, not about Does this person like me?
Will he still like me tomorrow?" Knox
writes. But if empowerment, that much
abused and much diminished term,
means anything it means being able to
say no as well as yes, without censure
or shame. It means neither being re-
flexively condemned as a volpe cat-
tiva---a wicked fox, as the Italian press
translated her nickname---nor sub-
mitting unthinkingly to contemporary
pressures.
It means the freedom that Isabel Ar-
cher claims for herself at the outset of
"The Portrait of a Lady," when her aunt
tells her that she has transgressed En-
glish social norms by sitting up late talk-
ing with the gentlemen. "I always want
to know the things one shouldn't do,"
Isabel says. "So as to do them?" her aunt
asks. "So as to choose," she replies. That
freedom remains the common desire of
young women; it is elusive now, as it
was then.
---Rebecca Mead